Global Ops: Commando Libya Review

AC/DC once said Hell ain't a bad place to be, but it would be if, once there, you had to play this

People complain about the misuse of the rating scales in game reviews, saying that 5 is the average and yet it ends up being around the 7 mark on most sites. It's used to show that games journalists are too afraid to give controversial marks for fear of offending the publishers or PR types and therefore hurting their chances of landing future titles or securing advertising.

This isn't going to happen with Global Ops: Commando Libya, because there's no question it's one of the worst shooters in the history of the world. Other than having people to shoot and guns and explosions and things in it, it fails to include virtually anything you'd imagine a modern shooter might consider 'standard'. Hell, it doesn't even include stuff that old school blasters had either.

Enemies love the 'mindless rush into deadly fire' tactic

Best thing about the game? The way the installer calls it 'GLOBALOPS', which if said correctly sounds like the name of a friendly troll or giant in a children's fairy tale. Unfortunately, Globalops is anything but a heart-warming story, ending up more like the bit in Hellraiser where Andrew Robinson gets torn to shreds by the Cenobites' hooks.

From minute one to the point where you simply can't take the pain any more, Globalops is a travesty, an abomination, a festering sore on the backside of the third-person shooter genre. Just scanning the back of the box after playing makes you want to vomit at the outright lies slapped on the back.

'Detailed graphics', it says. Despite using the Unreal Engine 3, the visuals are really quite bad, only occasionally rising above the depressingly bland and uninspired. 'A massive arsenal of different weapons and vehicles', it follows up. If you count a sniper rifle, a shotgun, the occasional rocket launcher, some automatics and a machine gun a 'massive arsenal', then yes, this could be true. There is a feeble shove attack too.

'Diverse missions and new assignments' is the next point. You do a mission then you go onto the next one. One's in the snow then one's in the desert. Then there's one in a mansion in the desert. You get the picture.

'Thrilling third-person action shooter: embark on a breathtaking hunt of dangerous terrorists'. It's breathtaking in the sense that you'll be trying to choke yourself to death in order to blot the memories of playing it from your mind, but yes, it is technically a third-person shooter. Even if said perspective is so rubbishly implement you can't fire down on enemies below you properly, as all your shots will hit the lip of the building.

The plot is ludicrous too, and you get the feeling the game was meant to be just about stopping some terrorists get an atomic bomb, but then Libya's troubles happened, so they tweaked things a bit and now you're biffing up Gaddafi's pals instead of just random Muslim combatants. Also, to be picky here, Gaddafi's loyalists weren't terrorists, they were just one side in a civil war.

Anyway, you're a CIA goon who's followed around by another CIA goon who is fond of just standing around in the open showing off how impervious his skin is to bullets. To be fair, he does occasionally shoot some enemies (take that, Call of Duty!) but generally he does the square root of frig all.

See that crosshair? Don't expect your bullets to go anywhere near it

However, it's lucky he's there sometimes, because without him, you may well be confused as to what you're meant to be doing, given that there are no mission markers or objective indicators. Or a map, or any help of any kind. This extends to the controls, as nowhere (that your reviewer could see) were there any instructions in-game telling you what key did what.

(Note – I've just looked in the manual and there is a controls list, but who looks at manuals nowadays? But yes, my kind of bad for not checking this during play)

Luckily, things aren't exactly complex and only the sprint key took your correspondent a while to discover. There's no sneak button though, which makes 'stealth' missions a perplexing addition, especially when you fail completely if you get spotted.

Again luckily, sometimes the enemy can be looking right at you from a distance of a metre away and not spot you. Then you sort of shove him a bit with your only melée attack and he makes a very strange constipated sound and dies. In fact, all of the enemies make curious squawks and gurgles when they go down. In Russian, too. Even in Libya, a lot of the combatants speak, or at least die in Russian. I had no idea the Russian Mafia was this powerful, able to fight in the civil wars of other nations.

The terrible voice acting isn't just confined to the dying enemies either. Your hateful characters are typical US jingoist extremists, shouting about 'tangos' and the sexing of peoples' mothers. “Don't f*ck with Pope!” shouts your guy when he sprays bullets haphazardly at a random foe. “Throwing some shit!” your character bellows as he feebly flips a grenade towards the terrorists/civil war combatants.

One more point to note is how wildly inaccurate the shooting is here, and how the generic enemies take seemingly random amounts of damage before they go down. And don't even think about getting any real feedback on whether you're hitting things or not, because it just doesn't happen. Or at least it happens so rarely as to effectively never happen.

But fatigue has set in and there are just too many things wrong with Global Ops: Commando Libya to squeeze into this review, what with the word limit 'n all. Walking over ammo doesn't automatically pick it up for you, rockets fired over cover sometimes hit said cover, even if you weren't aiming anywhere near it.

You don't get to blow up this tank, it just disappears when you enter the next building

Enemies will fire forever into objects between you and them, even when you actually move around into their line of sight. All the guns are reloaded in the same way, including shotguns. Enemies will run past your team mate straight at you, and he will do absolutely nothing to stop them. It's random whether you even get your ammo restocked between missions, as sometimes it does seem to happen and sometimes it doesn't.

Sigh. Let's just leave it here and say that Globalops is an utterly rubbish game. Don't buy it, even if you think “ooh, multiplayer too!” as it's just deathmatch and a 'domination' mode where you hold capture points. Also, nobody will be playing it. Hopefully, it's because nobody's bought it. If you do, you need your head examining.

GLOBAL OPS: COMMANDO LIBYA VERDICT

Sigh. Let’s just leave it here and say that Globalops is an utterly rubbish game. Don’t buy it, even if you think “ooh, multiplayer too!” as it’s just deathmatch and a ‘domination’ mode where you hold capture points. Also, nobody will be playing it. Hopefully, it’s because nobody’s bought it. If you do, you need your head examining.